Word Games

Announcing the Tylogram Summer Challenge!

Win bragging rights, eternal glory, and semi-valuable prizes if you can work out our mystery word in the next thirty days.

One of our redoubtable mascots tries to puzzle out the Tylogram Summer Challenge. (Illustration generated with Bing Image Creator.)

I’m a writer first and foremost, but that has never paid most or even many of the bills. I also work as a software developer, sometimes for other folks, sometimes for myself. One of my major ongoing projects is Spelling Bee Solver, a popular¹ website that offers daily hints to players of the New York Times Spelling Bee. Another is my own original word game, Tylogram.

A sample gameboard from the desktop version of Tylogram, showing a possible arrangement of the letter tiles with their resulting scores.

Tylogram, which launched on April 2, 2021, is a variation on Spelling Bee and similar word finders. Each puzzle features eight letters arranged at random in a 3x3 sliding-tile grid. The challenge is twofold. First, form as many words as possible from the grid, each of which must include the shaded “anchor” letter. Second, rearrange the tiles in the grid to achieve the highest possible scores for the words in your list, with the goal of meeting or beating the house score.